Sunday, 19 October 2014

Meticulous Visual Recreation Of Moon Landing Shows It Wasn't A Hoax

By
using its new dynamic lighting technology, GPU manufacturer NVIDIA has graphically
recreated the Apollo 11 moon landing site — and the results are crushing a
number of wild claims made by conspiracy theorists.

Yes, it's a
clever bit of self-promotion, but what NVIDIA Corporation's developers have
done is actually quite interesting. To show off the power of its new Maxwell graphics processing unit (GPU), Nvidia's game demo
team sought to digitally reconstruct one of Apollo 11's most iconic photographs
— Neil Armstrong's shot of Buzz Aldrin as he climbs down the lunar module's
ladder.

Why that
picture? Because it's a popular target used by moon landing deniers to bolster
their claim that it never happened. The photo, taken in 1969, shows Aldrin lit
against the dark landscape of the lunar module behind him. But conspiracy
theorists argue that, because the sun is behind the lunar module, and because
Aldrin is in its shadow, Aldrin must
have been lit by something other than the sun — like artificial lighting in a
studio.

The
developers also used Maxwell to bunk two other (supposed) issues: the absence
of stars in the background, and to answer the question as to why, given the
position of the sun behind the lander, details can be seen that would otherwise
be obscured by shadow.

It's All About the Voxels

The demo
team went to work by tapping into one of Maxwell's key technologies, Voxel-Based Global
Illumination (VXGI). This past Thursday, the company unveiled two new graphics
cards, the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, both of which are equipped with VXGI,
which renders real-time dynamic lighting.

VXGI allows
Nvidia's game developers to better represent the way light bounces from one
object to another in real time. It does this by breaking a scene's geometry
into thousands upon thousands of tiny boxes called "voxels," or 3D
pixels. Each of these six-sided voxels is analyzed to figure out its level of
transparency (opacity) and its emittance, which is how much, and what color,
light reflects from other objects in a scene.

Put together,
these boxes capture the dynamic way light bounces from one object to another —
including what happens when a character moves in front of a light source.

Rebuilding Apollo 11

To
graphically simulate the moon landing, the demo team gathered as much information
as they could. They even researched the rivets on the lunar lander, identified
the properties of dust coating the moon's surface, and measured the
reflectivity of the material used in the astronauts' space suits.

"We
talked to a lot of experts in the field to re-create what happened on the moon
that day," noted GeForce general manager Scott Herkelman in a Fast Company article. "We re-created perfectly what
they made and how the reflection would look off the suits, duct tape, aluminum
foil."

Original photograph of Buzz Aldrin at right,
and the computer-generated image at left.

During this
stage, the team uncovered an important clue: A video clip showing Aldrin
descending the ladder had a bright spot of light that appeared to move every
time the camera did.

"When
the glow started moving, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that's it,'" noted team
leader Mark Daly in a Nvdia
blog post. A senior GPU architect suggested that it wasn't artificial light
— but a reflection from Armstrong's bright white suit. Daly was skeptical, but their
models were able to reproduce exactly how the light was illuminating Aldrin's
suit at the precise moment Armstrong snapped his photo.

So, using
the Maxwell GPU, the demo team rebuilt the scene of the moon landing in Unreal
Engine 4, a game engine developed by Epic Games. They were able to show how the
sun's rays — coming in from behind the ladder — bounced off the moon's surface
and Armstrong's suit, to cast light on Aldrin as he stepped off the ladder.

What About the Stars?

The visual
recreation also addressed a common issue brought up by conspiracy theorists: photos from the
landing site don't show any stars. Fascinatingly, the demo team used Maxwell to
find them.

"The
reason the stars aren't visible is the exposures in the camera are set to
capture the scene on the Moon's surface," Daly says. "But they're
there. And our demo team was able to find them by digitally changing the
exposure on the shots to reveal them."

Why Isn't the Footage Obscured by Darkness?

As Alice
Truong explains
in the Fast Company
article:

The
conspiracy theorists who question why the footage isn't obscured by darkness
don't take into account how light from the sun interacts with the moon's
surface. The fine lunar dust covering the moon has mirror-like properties,
reflecting the sun and illuminating objects on the surface. "The sun is
hitting the dust, and it's illuminating the backside of the Apollo module and
astronaut," says Herkelman.

"It
turns out there is a lot of information about the astronomical bodies floating
out there in space," [Daly] explains. "Starting with the sun. The sun
itself is 128,500 lux — that's lumens per square meter - but it turns out the
moon is a crappy reflector of light." Daly discovered that the moon is
only 12-percent reflective, and absorbs most of the sunlight hitting it. On the
other hand, 12-percent of 128,500 lux is quite a lot. "It's the equivalent
to ten 100-watt lightbulbs per square meter of light bouncing off the
moon." More
than enough make Aldrin visible under the lander's shadow.

The findings
were particularly satisfying to Daly.

"Men
lost their lives as part of the Apollo project, so it bugs me when people say
it was all a hoax," he says. "People risked their lives to get to the
moon."

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